The newest not-so-weeHouse, which is also the first weeHouse in a major city, is having an open house next week. This is your chance to tour a prefab if you’re in the area! Located at 4221 Ewing Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Oeschger weeHouse is 2,200 sf with 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. They used four boxes in constructing the home with the following green features: high-R foam insulation, Kohler dual-flush toilets, bamboo floors and detailing, natural cedar siding, and floor-to-ceiling windows. The Urban weeHouse will be open for viewing on December 14, 2007, from 4 – 7 pm. Who knows, maybe you’ll end up with a weeHouse for Christmas?

You’ve probably heard of the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company … their houses have been featured in Time, Domino, USA Today, and the New York Times, to name a few publications. The home pictured above is different from their other homes, which have that traditional, A-frame-esque shape. All Tumbleweed homes are sufficiently small, but this home is modern. It’s 400 sf of green modern. The Z-Glass House is a stationary house, meant to be affixed to a foundation. You buy the plans and find a contractor to build it for you (with costs ranging in the $100 – $200 psf range). Or you can build it yourself. Check the layout, too. Such a great looking home, with a kitchen, bedroom, living room, and bathroom, what else do you need? Add a little solar on the roof, or maybe even a Skystream, and call it done.

This is the ASAP House, a House About Saving APlanet designed by Laszlo Kiss. Like many green designs generated these days, this home will be a net zero energy home — it will produce as much energy as it uses over a certain period of time. To do that, the home will have good insulation, Energy Star lighting fixtures, a 10 kW photovoltaic array, and a geothermal heating and cooling system. Currently, a prototype ASAP House is being built for Sag Harbor, New York. Just last month, the factory was moving along well on three modules that will end up completing the home.

The ASAP house will cost roughly $250-265 psf, depending on site conditions, and is being designed with LEED certification in the works. It is anticipated that the finished home will be about 2,500 sf, with 4 bedrooms, and 2.5 bathrooms. It’ll be fun to follow the blog progress and see the finished product. At that point, we’ll officially have one more prefab contender, and more particularly, one that can service the Northeast!

This green prefab, sponsored by French architecture magazine Architectures à Vivre, was on display last weekend at the Batimat Show in Paris. I think it’s called La Maison de Demain, which I also think is French for House of Tomorrow. We’ll go with that as the name for now. Their website is in French, so if anything, you can glean certain design elements from studying the images. Some of the below information is from Google’s translation, so I hope it’s accurate.

The home is built with three prefabricated modules and meant to show that green design can be affordable and attractive. An important aspect of the house is the open area in the middle, which could be used as a covered patio to extend the footprint of the home into the natural environment. Everything about the home is green, too, as far as I can tell: FSC-certified wood and siding, green label paints, low-VOC recycled carpet tiles, LED lighting, low-flow toilet, reinforced insulation, and photovoltaic panels. You’ll also notice the living roof that provides numerous efficiency benefits (and seems to get water from the slanted roof). In the end, the compact, modern home is very efficient. Matter of fact, it’s nearly net zero energy consumption once the solar panels are live. Nice.

It’s Friday and as I like to say, why not watch a little video? If you’ve been to Dwell lately, you’ll know they just unveiled their new, completely overhauled website. It’s super nice now, with easy access to images and information from their archives. There’s also a new video page with content of some very interesting leaders in design. Hence, the name for their new video series, Dwell Design Leaders. I’ve embedded the video of Michelle Kaufmann above talking about prefab and the mkLotus. The next video below is of David Baker. I found his comments extremely interesting. The last video below is Christopher Deam talking about his modern interpretation and design of the Airstream and his collaboration with Design Within Reach. Very compelling, really inspiring.